China Crossroads was formally invited to attend the fourth China forum on environment and development over this past weekend in Beijing. The forum was sponsored by SUEZ Environment; organized by the All China Environment Federation (ACEF) and the Center for Studies on China’s Circular Economy and Environmental Assessment and Forecasting; and hosted by the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.  Many experts from all over the world came to present their findings to further support a future low carbon cleaner, greener China.

Walking into the conference room area presented me with a contradiction that stayed with me the entire weekend. I don’t mean to be overly-critical, but the first thing I saw was nicely laid out plates and perfectly placed tongs to be used for individually packaged buns, cakes and biscuits?? This promptly got me to thinking about the environmental contradictions we all have in our lives; especially for we wanna-be environmentalists who often fall far short of the mark of being environmentally friendly.

We travel around attending conferences about CO2 reduction yet probably contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere from our travelling than the average person who doesn’t even think about environmental protection.  On another note, below is a summary of some of the interesting presentations.

• The U.N. is going to launch Carbon labeling and Eco-labeling soon in China.

• SUEZ Environnement (not misspelled!) has a project in Saudi Arabia that de-salinizes water and turns it into electricity.  In Mexico, SUEZ has a variety of projects that turns wastewater into fertilizer into energy. In Shanghai, they have the SCIP project that turns toxic waste into energy in the form of steam. In Hong Kong they have a project that treats landfill gas and turns it into energy. All of these projects can be seen at    http://www.suez-environnement.com/.

• The Forum really stressed the concept of “common but differentiated responsibility.” A speaker commented that at the Bonn Summit, developed countries made a lot of promises but never carried them out and that technology transfer hasn’t been enough in China.  At this point, I desperately wanted a speaker to get up at some point in the conference and look at China’s environmental challenge as a tremendous opportunity for China to rise and lead as an example. Instead, I heard more complaints and comparisons that made the West look bad (which are justifiable). Such statistical comparisons aimed at pointing the finger, however, do not move us forward.

• Watson Gin, California Department of Toxic Substances Control Chief Engineer, talked about “green chemistry” and how California was going about committing to the concept of a cradle to cradle production mode. First was the passage of the SB 509 (Senate Bill 509) and the AB 1879. Following this, he said that it is essential to disseminate information on toxic chemicals, account for chemical toxicity, train new generation of science and engineers and include green chemistry into the Environmental Education Initiative. The above steps will eventually lead to the ban of certain consumer products, which I find fascinating.

• Peak Oil Production: This is a huge topic that is dominating a lot of sustainability discussions.  According to Graeme Lang, Professor from the Department of Asian International Studies at City University Hong Kong, we already hit our peak discoveries in the 1960s and most oil experts do not expect any more major discoveries to occur. Production has been peaking the last decade and the last peak will consist of multiple mini-peaks and then sharp decline. The speaker gave numerous examples of urban re-localization that will help cities wean themselves off oil.  Check out www.peakoil.net.

• An idea that dominated the conference dealt with the reduction of urban sprawl in order to reduce energy use via less transportation, localized resources, etc. In accordance with this idea, vertical cities are better than suburban sprawl even though a Hong Kong architect presenter expressed dissatisfaction with Hong Kong’s vertical veneer.

• For me, the most interesting talk was by Yao Xin on Digital Environmental Protection and the way China is going about reducing Total Pollution Load (www.dept.ac.cn). He talked about a system that can sense and then send out warnings to factories in other provinces that are close to going over their pollution limit and an online supervision data and environment information data including pollution forecasts.

• Yu Xiaoxuan, Vice Director of Construction & Environment and on the Olympic Organizing Committee, cited Greenpeace’s China Olympics rating of 5 as evidence of China’s Green achievement (versus Athens score of 1 given by Greenpeace). I took this as a positive sign that a government official (or a person with high status) looked to an NGO’s work for legitimizing the Committee’s work. Hopefully this will become more of a trend.